The Pastor's Sermon - 6 May 2012 - 5th Sunday of Easter

{Due to circumstances probably well within my control, I didn't post my sermon for last Sunday. In fact, I FORGOT to take it to church last Sunday, and had to deliver it from memory. That's also known as "faking it" in jazz. Still my congregation was very tolerant and actually quite complementary.}

In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us... Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.

...We love because he first loved us. Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.

• There is the ancient story of Moses, a shepherd, and a fox, a story not found in the scripture but true nonetheless. Have you heard it?
• Moses finds a shepherd in the desert. He spends the day with the shepherd and helps him milk his ewes, and at the end of the day he sees that the shepherd puts the best milk he has in a wooden bowl, which he places on a flat stone some distance away.
• So Moses asks him what it is for, and the shepherd replies “This is God’s milk.” Moses is puzzled and asks him what he means. The shepherd says, “I always take the best milk I possess, and I bring it as an offering to God.”
• Moses, who is much more sophisticated than the shepherd with his naive faith, asks, “And does God drink it?”
• “Yes,” replies the shepherd.”He does.”
• Then Moses feels compelled to enlighten the poor shepherd, and he explains that God, being pure spirit, does not drink milk. Yet the shepherd is sure that He does, and so they have a short argument, which ends with Moses telling the shepherd to hide behind the bushes to find out whether in fact God does come to drink the milk. Moses then goes out to pray in the desert.
• The shepherd hides, the night comes, and in the moonlight the shepherd sees a little fox that comes trotting from the desert, looks right, looks left and heads straight towards the milk, which he laps up and disappears into the desert again.
• The next morning Moses finds the shepherd quite depressed and downcast. “What’s the matter?” he asks.
• The shepherd says, “You were right. God is pure spirit and He doesn’t want my milk.”
• Moses is surprised. He says, “You should be happy. You know more about God than you did before.”
• “Yes, I do,” says the shepherd, “but the only thing I could do to express my love for Him has been taken away from me.”
• Moses sees the point. He retires into the desert and prays hard. In the night, in a vision, God speaks to him and says, “Moses, you were wrong. It is true that I am pure spirit. Nevertheless, I always accepted with gratitude the milk which the shepherd offered me, as the expression of his love, but since, being pure spirit, I do not need the milk, I shared it with this little fox, who is very fond of milk.”
• So how do we show that we love God?
• First of all, let's start with love. John says God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. This is a verse often used at weddings that has nothing to do with weddings! It has to do with how a Christian lives his or her life each and every day. John also says We love because he first loved us. It is the love of God that precedes anything and everything that we might do. The love of God is still present even if we do not feel it and even if we do not spread it.
• John expresses the truth of the Gospel to his readers in the simplest terms: In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us... This holds just as true for our day and circumstances as it did to John's day and time.
• God's love is always before all else and his love precedes ours. Our love is a response to the love of God, given to us without any prerequisites or conditions. The requirements and conditions are our doing. We are the ones who have set limits on God, saying who is or is not worthy, who is or is not good enough, or how far God may go.
• And we might well say “Thank God” that God ignores the limitations we set and loves all of us anyway, without limits, with a wild abandon that is shown to us in the the Cross and in the Resurrection.
• Still, the love of God lays requirements on us. John lays it out for his readers in no uncertain terms: ...We love because he first loved us. Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.
• We don't know what exactly prompted John to write this. There is evidence of conflict in the churches John was writing to, evidence of some sort of problems that would lead him to write in such a way as to call some of his readers “liars.” Whatever it was, John expressed his love for the congregations he was writing to by doing what might have been a painful thing – calling them on their lack of love for one another.
• Love is a hard way to live. Love can be the tender feeling we know for a child or a loved one. It can be the warm glow when we remember a loved one and the pang of separation when we are away from them.
• Love can also be fierce, angry, self-denying, and even dying. That is why the cross is the symbol of such tremendous love. In truth, can we ever do enough to satisfy what love asks?
• No matter what, we live in the love of God and we take our lives from the love of God. What we have to give and to share flows from the love of God for us and it is expressed in our love for one another and for all the world, without a thought to the worthiness, acceptability, grace, beauty, or usefulness of those we are to love... for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.
• Does this seem odd to you? Does it seem strange that this is what the love of God would have us do? Maybe it's a case of what God gives and receives, God shares with others... like that simple bowl of milk in the desert... shared with a fox.